Tekken 6

The King of Iron Fist makes its much awaited first appearance on the current generation of consoles. Things have come a long way since the much hyped teaser in the Sony presentation at E3 2006, where they showed a photo-realistic Jin Kazama practicing his moves and working out a mean sweat.

Of course a lot of things have changed since then - people have realized that the Sony PS3 demonstration was nothing but a series of lies, and Tekken became a multi-platform title, by simultaneously releasing on the Xbox 360 as well. Oh and no, Jin Kazama looks nothing like he did in that trailer.

From the recent trend I’ve noticed, fighting games are trying to move away from the regular arcade fighting mode, which is evident in a lot of recent fighters I’ve tried out. This also holds true for Tekken 6, as the first option that you’re encouraged to try out is the story mode.

The story mode plays out like an oldschool brawler like Streets of Rage, or the Fatal Fury series of games, where you control a single character and face a good number of evil henchmen in multiple levels, all of which end up in a boss fight. As the name suggests, the story aspect of the story mode is quite strong. If you have the patience for it, you can watch the history of the entire Tekken series at the start of the story mode, before the current event kicks in.

You play the Story Mode as the new console exclusive characters Lars and Alisa, but you do get the option to unlock other fighters as you play through the campaign. Switching from one character to the other does have a novelty value to it, but frankly I thought that they all were just about equally effective. The controls tend to suffer a bit in this mode (just as many other games that have tried to bring the brawler genre to 3D), and the special moves and combos are not too easy to implement.

But all’s not bad. The rewards come easy here and the story mode is kind of fun if you want to take a break from the other modes. I just think that Mortal Kombat did a better job at bringing in a story mode in Mortal Kombat Deception and Armageddon.

Though the biggest draw of the home console version of the game is the Story mode, it’s the good old one-on-one fighting that’s more of my cup of tea.
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Tekken 6 puts the arcade mode hidden well inside the Offline Modes menu on the main screen, which came as a surprise considering that right from the starting cutscene you get the Insert Coin indicator flashing at the bottom. Once you do enter the arcade mode, you are greeted by 40 ready-to-play fighters. I’m not a big fan of keeping fighters hidden in the arcade mode, as it diminishes the pick-up-and-play value of fighting games, which actually is what they’re all about. I’m glad that Tekken 6 doesn’t do that.

Among the new characters are the above mentioned Lars and Alisa along with Bob, Zafina, Leo and Miguel. All the new characters are pretty much in sync with the rest of the fighters in the game, so you don’t feel that there’s a loss of balance. Alisa is, however the most fun, with her quirky move set like placing her head in the opponent’s hands till it explodes. Zafina adds a very cool belly-dancing, snake-like moveset to the game.

The fighting mechanics are as brilliant as ever. If you’ve ever played a Tekken game before, you’ll be in familiar territory right from the get-go. You have the regular four button gameplay, with each button controlling an individual limb. You can get a list of combos from the moves list in the pause menu, but the best part is stringing those combos together to create one big move, through which you overpower your opponent from the start of the round to the end. Of course the defense is also an equally strong part of the game, and this time blocks happen automatically when you’re standing still instead of you constantly pressing back. This is a big step for the game, as not many Tekken loyalists would be used to that. I personally found myself pressing the back button for defense, only to get my butt whooped instead.

Online play was a bit tough to get into at the time of review, as the game couldn’t once find an opponent for me. Instead I had to make do with fighting against the recorded ‘ghosts’ that the game automatically downloaded. The game seems to practically base its entire AI on ghosts of other players, as it uses them in various single player modes including arcade. This works great as fighting against a ghost created by a human player is always a lot more gratifying than computer controlled characters.

Character customization from Tekken 5 has made its way over here as well. As one can expect, the options range from cool to ridiculously obscure. You can change any character’s hairdo on different levels, add weapons to the look, put on a clown nose or paint your hair red.

Before I mention anything about the game’s visuals I think I should fairly warn you — by default the motion blur effect is set to on, which makes the game play in standard definition. If you have your console connected to a high-definition display, turn off this effect so that you can enjoy the game in all it’s 720p glory. It took me a while to figure out that motion blur causes a drop in resolution, so playing the game is standard def on a 1080p display was a complete eyesore.

Visually, Tekken 6 doesn’t break any new grounds. It’s a good looking game, but that’s it. Overall it seems like a graphical upgrade to what you already saw in Tekken 5 - the environmental damage is minimal, your environment never affects the gameplay. Basically everything you see around your character is mere eye-candy. But this time, at least the eye-candy is good.

There are a lot more things happening in the background now. There’s a rooftop level with helicopters crashing all around you; then there’s the village level where a poultry jeep goes a bit out of control in the beginning, causing the level to be filled with livestock. Seriously, would it have killed Namco to make the levels a bit more interactive? The elements were practically all there!

Controls on the Xbox 360 controller were not too bad. The Tekken gameplay was always about a single direction press and button combos, which is a system that works perfectly well with the Xbox 360 controller.

In the last year and a half there has been a great flow of fighting games on the current generation of consoles, which is odd, considering that there were hardly any fighting games released before that on these platforms. In this now crowded market, Tekken 6 doesn’t do anything drastically new, but it does do a good job of retaining the things you like best about the series. If you’ve been yearning for a Tekken game in high definition, then you don’t need me to tell you to pick this up.

My conclusion is a note to Namco - It’s about time the series got a major upgrade, more than simple facelifts.